its true that 8meg from BT wasnt the best although i personally did get very close to the cap.
I changed to BE broadband yesterday on their adsl2 network and i have got a nice connection of 23 meg down 2.5 meg up.
The connection speed is great and it is better than what virgin could offer me if they could get me a connection. They dont connect flats so i cant go on cable anyway. Doesnt stop them ending me 2 or 3 leaflets a week though.

So Virgin should really start to advertise based on current connections, based on ADSL2, which so far offers a faster speed than that 20 meg fixed speed that they talk about and that is fact(in my case)

Comparing the new cable to ADSL is like comparing a Honda civic type-r with a standard bottom of the line honda, where really they should be comparing a type-r with a subaru impreza turbo.
Currently they are not really doign a fair comparison.
Compare cable to ADSL2 and you have a whole different situation

Been with them since Telewest, only ever had problems since virgin took over. First they refused to replace the broken modem, even when they admitted they owned it and was their problem (all in one sentence!). A quick call to UK customer service to dump them fixed that. Then they introduced throttling (25% of normal speed) after you used a couple of gig of data during large chunks of the day. Stuffed me on a busy workday as I adjust/fix/assess files for graphic repro companies. You can do that amount of data on a 10mbs line in a very very short time. Oh, and forget contributing to the open source community by hosting Linus images for torrents, unless you throttle your upload to dial up speeds.

The only reason I stay with them is that 10mbs is 10mbs, going to a BT/Copper based alternative would cost me a lot more to get the same speed less reliably. BE or ADSL24 are always on the back burner though.

Every single add that they've run in the last 2 years has had complaints made about it for being false. It's nice to see at least one of them getting banned. Also - people should stop calling the virgin fibre service "fibre to the home". it's not.

Cable Internet is a complete postcode lottery, if you happen to be in a lightly subscribed area where the UBR's (Routers) arent overloaded with subscribers, you are laughing, and should get the full speed most of the time.

More likely though, is that you will live in an area that has overloaded UBR's, in which case the service can be just plain terrible...and all of a sudden, 'old fashioned' copper wire networks seem like travelling by bullet train compared to what peak time usage is like on a crappy UBR fibre network.

Of course, theres no way to tell which side of the UBR fence you sit, until you have signed the fixed term contract...

I've been a 20Mb Virgin customer for about a year and before that I was with NTL for several years, dial up then Cable. In both cases I was living in a second floor flat. I've not had a single problem with them (apart from the occaisional V+ box rebooting but that's a different matter).

My parents have been with virgin for about 8 years and are lucky enough to be in a cable area. They get 10Mb all day everday with no problems.

I on the other hand have to make do with their pathetic adsl service. Their service cuts out randomly and most annoyingly they seem to consider "peak" time as something absurd like 10am-2am, so i am being continually throttled even when I havent downloaded ANYTHING.

The best example of their service was a few weeks ago when they inexplicably capped our internet at 5kb/s yes thats right, 5! An hour on the phone to "customer support" ended in them denying anything was wrong and telling me to reboot the router 4 times in a row to magically fix it.... When this failed to fix the problem (what a shocker!) the customer service person actually said "i don't know what the problem is, or how to fix it"... right.... thanks. 2 weeks later the internet magically went back to normal... yay

its true that 8meg from BT wasnt the best although i personally did get very close to the cap.
I changed to BE broadband yesterday on their adsl2 network and i have got a nice connection of 23 meg down 2.5 meg up.
The connection speed is great and it is better than what virgin could offer me if they could get me a connection. They dont connect flats so i cant go on cable anyway. Doesnt stop them ending me 2 or 3 leaflets a week though.

So Virgin should really start to advertise based on current connections, based on ADSL2, which so far offers a faster speed than that 20 meg fixed speed that they talk about and that is fact(in my case)

Comparing the new cable to ADSL is like comparing a Honda civic type-r with a standard bottom of the line honda, where really they should be comparing a type-r with a subaru impreza turbo.
Currently they are not really doign a fair comparison.
Compare cable to ADSL2 and you have a whole different situation

Cable could go much faster than ADSL but virgin see no financial incentive, I think they have the capacity for bandwidths up to about 200MB/s if they pulled their finger out. It suits them to keep the market like it is currently though, as in 3/4 years time their 200mb service will cost £50 a month rather than if they released it now they would have to bring the price down in that time.

I have 10mb Virgin and always get the 10mb they provide and seldom have any problems.
Unfortunatly it would be nice if I could ACTUALY utilise that 10mb line for more than 15 minutes before my connection gets throttled back to the stone age.
Its akin to handing someone the keys to a Ferrari and then telling them they cant drive it faster than 5mph, its bloody stupid.

This broadband is all very confusing. Next year, me and 3 mates are moving in together for our second years of Uni, and we live in a fibre optic enabled area. At first I was looking at Virgin's 50MB/s service, but if they can not assure me I will always get that speed, I don't see the point paying for it.

What would you guys reccomend? Anyone with any experience in shopping for the fastest reliable connection out there? We are all pretty heavy users, and the bill will be split 4 ways, so it doesn't really matter if it costs alot.

What would you guys reccomend? Anyone with any experience in shopping for the fastest reliable connection out there? We are all pretty heavy users, and the bill will be split 4 ways, so it doesn't really matter if it costs alot.

i'd recommend *be, thats who i use. near enough their 24mb promise (around 20-22) and its only 25 quid

BE are pretty much the best ISP in the UK. I do have a problem with latency at the moment but thats because of a with the house, not the connection. The modem they give you is crap though. Ours kept overheating.

i'd recommend *be, thats who i use. near enough their 24mb promise (around 20-22) and its only 25 quid

Your statement is as misleading as anything Virgin put out. With any copper system you'll get fairly close to the maximum only if you live on top of the exchange and have good wiring in between. There are plenty of people on the Be* forum getting very much less than 20Mbps on a LLU plan, distance is everything.

I'm on O2, advertised as "up to 20Mbps", only a few hundred yards from the exchange but I've never seen better than 18Mbps. Not that I'm grumbling.

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